The highlights were crap.
Mark Hendren will tell you that himself. He was a teenager at Mississippi State. Mark said he could do it. He had never done it. He had watched someone do it. He said yes anyway. The footage was bad. But the guy who was supposed to be there came back and taught him.
Zoomed in on this. Pulled back this way. This is how I do it. Mark learned. He went on to shoot for ESPN , work all four TV stations in Birmingham, and build a career in the classroom.
He’s three years into the classroom now. Helena High School. Teaching broadcast. And the thing keeping him up at night isn’t lesson plans. It’s kids playing Cool Math Games while he’s setting up a cinema camera three feet away. “You drag out the boom pole. You start balancing the gimbal. You’re doing the thing right in front of them. And most of them don’t even look up.”
“I’m trying to challenge myself,” he said, “to get kids to say how. Why. Whatever it is.” The word he kept coming back to was curious. Not motivated. Not engaged. Curious. There’s a difference. Motivation is something you manufacture. Curiosity is what Mark had at 11 years old when you were doing television at your church and caught a bug that never left.
Getting students to face failure is tough. Mark’s answer isn’t to push harder. It’s to make the failure smaller and cheaper. Tell them from the first day that this is going to suck. That’s the plan. You’re not supposed to be good at this yet. Your first package is going to be rough. Put it on the show anyway. Let people see where you started.
Mark starts year four this fall with a new studio, four cameras for the football video board, and a kid who’s been with him all four years who he flat-out refused to loan to a local news director as an intern. “You cannot have her,” he said. He meant it.
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